Description

In this compelling study, Damani J. Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but post-reunification transformations of German society have in fact produced noncitizens: non-white and "foreign" Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers "left behind" in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. In these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.

Author Bio

Damani J. Partridge is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

“Opens up new horizons in conceptualizing the place of biologically non-German bodies in contemporary Germany.”
— Esra Özyürek, University of California, San Diego

“Partridge shows how being included in the body politic can be a form of social control and exclusion. . . . Provides a case study for how one can look at identity politics in connection with the debates about human or national rights for citizens.”
— Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

Customer Reviews

Table of Contents

AcknowledgmentsPrologueIntroduction: Becoming Noncitizens1. Ethno-patriarchal Returns: The Fall of the Wall, Closed Factories, and Leftover Bodies2. Travel as an Analytic of Exclusion: The Politics of Mobility after the Wall3. We Were Dancing in the Club, Not on the Berlin Wall: Black Bodies, Street Bureaucrats, and Hypersexual Returns4. The Progeny of Guest Workers as Leftover Bodies: Post-Wall West German Schools and the Administration of Failure5. Why Can't You Just Remove Your Headscarf So We Can See You? Reappropriating "Foreign" Bodies in the New GermanyConclusion: Intervening at the Sites of Exclusionary Production Epilogue: Triangulated (Non)Citizenship: Memories and Futures of Racialized ProductionNotesReferencesIndex